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Chapter 3:
Reburial Logistics
Denikinʹs coffin in St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral, New York. Source: wikiwand.com
On November 5, 2004, Vladimir Putin released a decree ordering the transfer of the remains of both the Denikin and the Ilyin couples. This was followed on March 31, 2005, by a governmental decree.1 The Moscow municipality , which was put in charge of the logistics, issued its own decree on the double reburials “with the aim of reinforcing the ROC blessings of the idea of civic peace in the society and national unity.”2 On June 22, 2005, a special commission was set up to return the remains to Russia. The Special Commission—headed by the director of the Department of Foreign Relations of the Ministry of Culture and Mass Communications, Andrei Iu. Vulf, and the Russian Cultural Foundation—included representatives of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Presidential Administration, and the ROC.

Denikin was buried in New Jersey, his wife in Paris, and the Ilyins in Switzerland, so three different jurisdictions—New York, Paris, and Geneva—were involved in this collective reburial. The Geneva authorities and the Zollikon commune representatives did not immediately give permission to move Ilyin’s remains. All the work of preparing for the transportation of Ilyin’s ashes was undertaken by the Russian embassy in Switzerland and its cultural attaché, Konstantin Nefedov. The Moscow municipality provided air transportation for the Russian delegation and for the remains of the Denikins and Ilyins to Russia, while oligarch Viktor Vekselberg’s foundation, Link of Time (Sviaz’ vremen), created in 2004 with the explicit goal of returning to Russia the cultural treasures that had left the country in the twentieth century, was asked to fund the reburial ceremony.3
Reburial ceremony at the Donskoi monastery. Source: vk.com
On September 28, 2005, the Russian delegation arrived in the city of Zollikon. In Zurich, a memorial service was held for the Ilyins. Metropolitan Laurus, the First Hierarch of ROCOR, spoke at Ivan’s Ilyin memorial service.4 That same day , a separate memorial service was held at the Znamensky Church in New York for Anton Denikin.5 On September 30, a memorial service was held for Denikin's wife in Paris’ Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. On October 2, the coffins containing the remains of the Denikin and Ilyin families, stationed in Paris, traveled to Moscow, accompanied by Nikita Mikhalkov and Zurab Chavchavadze.6

On October 3, 2005, the reburial of the remains of General Anton Denikin, Ivan Ilyin, and their spouses took place in the necropolis of the Moscow Donskoi Monastery.7 The choice of the Donskoi Monastery was an intentional one: several families of the upper echelons of the aristocracy had chosen it for their burial vaults, and no Soviet figures were buried in the old necropolis, giving the monastery the image of a place embodying prerevolutionary Russia and protected from the shadow of communism. Ivan Shmelev was buried there in 2000. The Donskoi Monastery’s anti-Soviet image explains why Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn explicitly asked to be buried there too.
Reburial ceremony at the Donskoi monastery. Source: vk.com
Along with Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Alexii II, the following figures participated in the ceremony: from the Russian political sphere, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, Georgy Poltavchenko, then-Minister of Culture and Mass Communications Alexander Sokolov, and Andrei Iu. Vulf; from the Church, Patriarch Kirill and then-Father Tikhon; and from the civilian realm, Maria Denikina-Gray, Nikita Mikhalkov, Elena and Zurab Chavchavadze, Tamara Poltoratskaya, Yuri Lisitsa, and Alexei Denisov, a TV documentary journalist for the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company who had produced documentaries about Ilyin.

Denisov worked for Soviet state television and produced a documentary on the Romanovs as early as 1989. Between 1993 and 1995 he took the lead on a new documentary series called “Russkii mir” (Russian World, written in the prerevolutionary alphabet) celebrating Russia’s imperial past. In the 2000s he screened several films commissioned by Mikhalkov, such as “Russian Emigration (Russkii iskhod, 2002) and “Ilyin’s Philosophical Testament” (Zaveshchanie filosofii Il’ina, 2005). Since 2013 he has been chief editor of the state channel History.8
Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov). Source: Wiki Commons
A few months later, in 2006, Poltavchenko and the Russian Cultural Foundation initiated the transfer of Ilyin's archive to Moscow State University. Vekselberg's spokesman, Andrei Shtorkh, declared: “Georgy Poltavchenko, who was involved in the return of the archives, turned to us with a request to help. We provided some financial assistance through the Link of Times fund.”9 The Fund spent US $60,000 on this endeavor. The archives were solemnly received by Moscow State University in November 2006.

The concluding phase of this national reconciliation occurred in 2009 with the inauguration of a modest memorial to White soldiers on the territory of the Donskoi Monastery to replace a chapel that was never built.10 Putin inaugurated it by depositing some flowers on the Denikins’, the Ilyins’, and General Kappel’s graves; he also visited those of Ivan Shmelev and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.11

Tikhon, who has been a driving force behind Denikin’s and Ilyin’s rehabilitation, commented on Putin’s interest in conservative thinkers shortly after the President’s second visit to Donskoi:
All of them—Denikin, Shmelev, Ilyin—were not just extraordinary personalities, but also had a special influence on the fate of Russia. Vladimir Vladimirovich, as we walked through the cemetery, spoke of Denikin's memoirs. In his memoirs, he also wrote about plans to dismember Russia. After all, even his comrades-in-arms from the White movement suggested that he could share territory with the interventionists. But Denikin always categorically rebelled against such plans. He believed that forces hostile to Russia would always seek to “Balkanize” it. By the way, Ilyin also wrote “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World.” And he wrote it at a time when Soviet power was on the rise and it was difficult for anyone to imagine the possibility of collapse. All these people have a lot in common. A tragic fate. Ilyin, for example, was arrested in 1922 for the sixth time and sentenced to death. If not for the deportation, if not for his departure on the “philosophers’ ship,” he would have been shot. Shmelev's beloved son was shot by the Bolsheviks. In addition to their tragic fate, they were Christians who wholeheartedly served the country and the people. Although each of them, like any person, probably could not avoid mistakes. But they served sincerely.12
The “White corner” at Donskoy monastery. Source: Facebook
Tikhon implicitly drew a clear parallel between Russia, at risk of dismemberment by Western intervention during the civil war, and today’s Russia, also threatened by the West. Tikhon has indeed specialized in historical analogies, also visible in his instrumentalization of Byzantium and in his key role in erecting the historical park “Russia, my history”.

His 2008 pseudo-documentary film “The Destruction of an Empire: Lesson from Byzantium” compared Byzantium to Putin’s Russia, framing the two states as facing the same eternal external enemies—the West (with the historical analogy to Western Crusades) and terrorism (with the historical analogy to the Islamic conquest of Byzantium)—as well as domestic enemies (oligarchs and liberal forces).13
Putin’s visit to the Denikins’ and Ilyin’s graves. Source: Facebook
The recreational historical park “Russia, my history” is promoted as a living textbook, with visitors passing through three exhibition halls, devoted to Russia’s first dynasty (the Ryurikids), the Romanovs, and Soviet history, respectively. The park designers took their inspiration from multimedia technologies, combining many visual elements—photos, videos, and animations—with infographics and short texts.

The exhibitions thus aim to offer not a research-based product, like a conventional museum, but a visual experience with widespread popular appeal. The project seems to be primarily targeting schoolchildren, with the goal of shaping the youngest citizens’ views of national history, and a broad audience. It embodies this ideologically-loaded “applied history,” in which every revolt against the tsars is framed as a “color revolution.”14
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